IT/Web: June 2012 Archives

"Finally, NASA shifted to a new web services model that uses Amazon Web Services for cloud-based enterprise infrastructure. This cloud-based model supports a wide variety of web applications and sites using an interoperable, standards-based, and secure environment while providing almost a million dollars in cost savings each year.

"Ray O'Brien, acting CIO at NASA Ames, when asked May 30 by InformationWeek about NASA's participation, used diplomatic language to say that NASA still endorsed the project, was proud of its founding role, and might be a user of OpenStack components in the future. "It is very possible that NASA could leverage OpenStack as a customer in the future," he wrote in his email response. ... [NASA CIO Linda] Cureton's reference to "an interoperable, standards-based environment" could have been taken from the OpenStack playbook. Amazon Web Services, to which Cureton was actually referring, uses proprietary Amazon Machine Images as the basis for workloads that run in its Elastic Compute Cloud ... But nowhere in her references to an open environment was there any mention of OpenStack. At the same time, OpenStack has gained the backing of 175 other companies--including IBM, HP, Red Hat, Del,l and Intel--as the primary open source cloud offering."

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"Recently, on May 15, NASA announced a new cloud computing strategy for the Agency at the Uptime Institute's symposium in Santa Clara, CA. Among its facets is a reduction to our OpenStack development efforts in favor of becoming a "smart consumer" of commercial cloud services."

"Improved investment management practices, the use of cloud services when appropriate, and the use of shared services as a provider and consumer are core tenets in our IRM Strategic Plan released in June 2011. To underscore the importance of this shift, I identified a Deputy CIO for IT Reform, Gary Cox, in 2012 to provide an integrated focus on IT innovation and service delivery to ensure that our services are effective and efficient from our customers' perspectives."

"What she did not mention was anything about OpenStack, the infrastructure as a service platform that grew out of initial work by NASA and Rackspace. OpenStack is being pushed as an alternative to Amazon Web Services by several tech heavyweights including Hewlett-Packard, IBM, and Red Hat. This blog piqued my interest because, in late March, another NASA official said publicly that the agency is backing off additional OpenStack development."

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